Usually when I see a list of quotes, there might be one or two that I like. Here they are all zingers:
• “I’ve always been very careful never to predict anything that has not already happened.” — Marshall McLuhan
• “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Dorothy Parker
• “Decisions are made by those who show up.” — Jennifer Pahlka
• “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein
• “Not long ago what we have today was so implausible that nobody bothered to say it would never happen.“ — Marc Andreessen
• “The first 90% of a project is a lot easier than the second 90%.” — Tim Sweeney
• “If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.” — General Shinseki
— Kevin Kelly
This is from Recomendo, a weekly newsletter from Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson that “…gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff”: https://recomendo.com/
Also from Recomendo:
Unlocking phone:
If you bought a phone that’s locked to a specific mobile carrier, you won’t be able to use it with another carrier until you get it unlocked. AT&T says they will unlock phones you’ve had for two years, but the process is so arduous that it’s never worked for me. They make it difficult on purpose, I suspect. But I’ve unlocked phones using an unlocking service on eBay and paying $6 per phone. I gave them the phone’s 15-digit IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) serial number and a day later they sent me an email to let me know it’s been unlocked. I have no idea how they do it, but it works. — MF
Our new book Small Homes: The Right Size is now available at independent bookstores, and Amazon — as well as from us: www.shelterpub.com/building/small-homes
Shameless Commerce Dept. This is, I think, the best building book we’ve ever done. (Yes, I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it keeps reoccurring to me.) Shelter is everyone’s favorite; it captured the times, it inspired thousands of homes. Builders of the Pacific Coast is in some ways, my best book. It’s an odyssey of discovery where the reader rides shotgun with me over a 2-year period. Cohesive and focused.
BUT Small Homes is so useful to so many people in this era of astronomical home prices and rents, that I think it’s hugely important. It offers alternatives to people looking for rentals on Craigslist or homes on Zillow. Here are 65 very different homes, of different materials, in different parts of the world. The idea, as with all our building books is to use your hands to create your own shelter.
Two things I’ve discovered about this book (after seeing the finished product):
- There are a lot of homes out in middle America – Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, more so than in any of our other books.
- It sparkles. Largely due to Rick’s considerable Photoshop skills, a motley assortment of photos from contributors have been rendered in colorful detail. I was stunned when I saw the first book off the press. The photos draw you in.
Tags: alternative energy, architecture, books, builders, building, carpentry, communication, design, homes, homesteading, natural materials, recycling, small homes, small towns, tiny homes Article in New York Times Sunday by Alex Williams
“…’Mom, are you on acid?’ her daughter asked sarcastically.
Ms. Waldman froze. It was not yet the moment, she decided, to answer ‘yes.’
Ms. Waldman had discovered microdosing, an illegal but voguish drug regimen in which devotees seek to enhance creativity, focus and mental balance by ingesting regular, barely perceptible doses of hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.
Forget ‘turn on, tune in, drop out.’ To recent converts like Ms. Waldman, who recounts her microdosing journey in a new memoir, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next week, it’s a new psychedelic era. For them, LSD is less a kaleidoscopic mind expander than a humble mood enhancer, as subtle and quotidian as Prozac.…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/style/microdosing-lsd-ayelet-waldman-michael-chabon-marriage.html?_r=0
I’m doing an author appearance at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute on January 29, 2017. It’s a reception at 5PM that day, where authors meet booksellers. I’ll be talking about our forthcoming book, Small Homes: The Right Size, and handing out copies of Tiny Homes. https://www.bookweb.org/wi2017/winter-institute
I’m going there a few days early to explore around the Twin Cities. Any advice on things to do there?
And, as of about a half hour ago, it looks like after the event, I’ll drive the next day to Grand Marais and visit folks at the North House Folk School, and do some kind of presentation there.
***
I’m gonna get together a state of the state at our publishing company and of what I’ve been doing lately, now that the book is off to the printers. I’ve cut down a lot on my posts in the last year, what with now using Instagram, and finishing my 1st book in 3 years, but I have a bit of posting to do soon. Stay tuned.
We got the proofs back last week, and I almost cried when I went through it page by page. Sounds dumb, I know, but it was overwhelming to see all the pages, in collated order, full size, 4-color for the first time — after a couple of years working on it. I’d only seen rather low-quality, reduced size printouts up until now. And you know what, it’s ahem, a beautiful book.
People, home builders from all walks of life, a great variety of designs, materials, locales. It may very well be the most useful book we’ve ever done. Tiny homes are great for some people, but too small for most. Here are 65 or so homes in all, a cornucopia of ideas for people who can’t afford high rents and bank mortgages, and want to build or remodel (or contract out) their own homes.
Check out the “sneak previews” on TheShelterBlog:
https://www.theshelterblog.com/?s=sneak+preview
Book due out April, 2017. More details to follow here.
Rick and I are in the final stages of preparing Small Homes for the printers. We changed the cover from an earlier version, which showed a small turn-of-the-century home in Santa Cruz (in this revised cover, it’s the middle image in the left hand column), because a single image didn’t seem to represent the diversity of images (120 or so small homes) in the book. Hence the collage.
Below are two alternatives, the same except for the background color. In the one with the red, it’s similar-looking to Home Work, Builders of the Pacific Coast, and Tiny Homes on the Move. Some of our savvy book friends think it’s too similar, and that another color would distinguish it from the other books. Hence the other with the dark green background.
Comments, please. Which do you like? Do you see any problem in this cover being similar to our other books?
Tags: architecture, art, books, builders, building, green building, homes, homesteading, masonry, natural building, natural materials, salvaged materials, Scotland, small homes, small towns, timber frame, woodwork 
